Victims and voyeurism
Clark Gardner was one of the many first-timers attending the auction. The San Francisco resident recently returned from a two-year stint as an elder care worker in Hawaii, and he was eager to witness the dot-com demise he had been reading about. (He also snagged an ergonomic office chair for US$50.)
"I keep hearing about all these companies melting down and I think it's fascinating--I just had to check this out," Gardner said.
He pointed to a bank of about 120 phones, including one whose user had written next to the auto-dial buttons "dad," "dad's car," "Aspen Meadows" and "mom in Florida." The person drew a pink palm tree next to the last listing.
Next to the phone bank was an erasable board that still had the remnants of a Greenlight.com meeting on it, including the names of the "Toyota team" (Justin, Jason, Rhonda, Eric, Daryl and Margot), their percentages of deals closed and number of open orders. The "team goal" was mercifully erased.
"What a creepy little feeling you get looking at all this stuff," Gardner said.
Charyn said it's impossible not to get emotionally tugged by the dot-com skeletons that surround him. Although his father founded the business 12 years ago to liquidate assets in the restaurant industry, dot-com assets have become a staple in the past year.
"It's not just another company out of business," the 31-year-old San Francisco resident said. "These people put in 12- to 14-hour days, sacrificed their family and their lives for these businesses... Sometimes we go in and we see the toys and photos on their desks. It's hard not to get personal about it."
But members of the business, which has 14 full-time workers and 10 part-timers, try to keep a broad perspective about the dot-corpses, chalking up the auctions to the "circle of life" of any business.
"We try to recoup most of the cost of the assets for the (venture capitalists) so that the VC gets some money back and isn't afraid to fund the next start-up," Charyn said. "One hand washes another."
